“A vivid, compelling tale . . . The sheer beauty of Smith’s prose . . . alternates passages of lush lyricism with moments of epigrammatic bluntness. [And] Smith proves as adept at building suspense as any thriller writer.”
—Brannon Costello, Clarion Ledger
“[Katy Simpson] Smith combines botany and the Roman Colosseum to tell a riveting story.”
—Shelbi Polk, Shondaland
“A lyrical dive into . . . loss, defiance and need, told through the stamens, leaves and petals of flowers and weeds.”
—New Orleans magazine
“A furious, beautiful book about the quest for knowledge and women’s part in that quest, as well as a passionate reminder that the struggle for women’s rights is ongoing.”
—Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune
“The Weeds is the kind of novel that’s like Halley’s Comet — something of its kind appears infrequently, but when it does, it leaves a significant impression.”
—Nicole Yurcaba, Southern Review of Books
“Irresistible . . . The dangerous potential inside every desire, every choice, drives the suspense in this engrossing novel.”
—Emily Choate, Chapter 16
“Luminous . . . A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Marvelous . . . [The Weeds] shows a real power of storytelling . . . A wonderful book . . . [that’s] bound to find a place in your memory whenever you see a clump of rosemary.”
—Konstantin Rega, Virginia Living
“Laced with existential musing and dark humor . . . We begin to understand why these two women are here, in an ancient place where there is blood still deep in the sand, and, more importantly, what they are going to do about it.”
—Amanda Cockrell, The Historical Novels Review
“Full of wonders and history and secrets . . . Impressive.”
—Freya Sachs, Bookpage, starred review
“Garden lovers will delight in this roving, fascinating novel that follows a Mississippi woman who discovers the unexpectedly rich plant world of the Roman Colosseum. Wanderlust: induced!”
—CJ Lotz, Garden & Gun
“Erudite, playful, and filled with fury about gender inequality, [The Weeds] can be recommended to readers of cli-fi and feminist literary fiction.”
—Booklist
“[A] centuries-spanning story . . . Katy Simpson Smith muses on the constraints and choices of women trying simply to survive.”
—Eliza Smith, Literary Hub
“Ingenious . . . Potent details bring [The Weeds] to vibrant life . . . Readers will enjoy stopping to smell the clematis.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A novel that repurposes the old-school botanical survey as a way of sorting through curiosity and desire in their rawest forms, set against the high-romantic backdrop of the Roman Colosseum in plant-strewn, crumbling ruin.”
—Sam Bett, Literary Hub
“[A] subtle, intelligent work.”
—Library Journal
“Brilliant, poetic, unnerving, wholly original. What else would you expect from Katy Simpson Smith? With The Weeds, she has written another masterpiece.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
“The Weeds is the story of secrets in plain sight—plants in the cracks of a monument, women’s lives rooted in spaces that provide them no sunlight or water—but this novel is anything but quiet or secretive. It is explosive and prismatic. I will be recommending this novel to everyone forever.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“A beautiful, strange, and compelling novel. I liked it for its playfulness about history, for its embrace of bodies in place, for its sense of doom and weirdness at loose in the world. I kept wanting my friends to read it so we could talk about it.”
—Sarah Moss, author of The Fell
“What a terrific novel! Strange, moving, and marvelously alive, The Weeds works—like the eponymous flora that fills its pages—with subtle insistence and exuberant power to unfurl its ingeniously twinned stories of injustice, heartbreak, desire, and hope. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
“Intricately written, combining lush prose, deep insights, and a wicked sense of humor, The Weeds is an irresistible reading experience. Katy Simpson Smith is a wholly original voice with talent to spare.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
01/09/2023
Smith revisits Rome, the setting of The Everlasting, with another sensuous and sprawling story of the Eternal City. In the 1850s, British botanist Richard Deakin sets about cataloging the flora of the Roman Colosseum. Smith focuses on Deakin’s apprentice, an unnamed woman who is apprehended for burglary and lesbianism and forced by her father to help Deakin. The apprentice’s chapters alternate with present-day entries from the point of view of an unnamed graduate student who is assisting her adviser in replicating Deakin’s study. As the apprentice toils through her sentence, the student rues her lazy and mediocre adviser, a man who says “dumb things” like “Something is always blooming.” The story unfurls, unhurriedly, in the form of an indexed list of vegetation from both narrators in which the entries serve as metaphors for the stifled women’s respective predicaments. Of bitter-cress, for instance, Smith writes: “Picture a plant so sensitive, so f-ing heart-on-its-sleeve, that it built its seeds to explode in a shower of fireworks every time so much as the gentlest thrush wing brushes by.” It’s an ingenious device to connect these resilient characters across time, and to show how women can fall through the cracks and still flourish. There’s not much narrative momentum, but the potent details bring this to vibrant life. Patient readers will enjoy stopping to smell the clematis. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Apr.)
12/01/2022
In Smith's (The Everlasting) new novel, two women separated by 170 years catalogue the flora at the Roman Colosseum. In 1855, a woman (and a subtle thief) who grieves her former lover (who married a man and is now on her honeymoon) during her apprenticeship to botanist Richard Deakin. She logs over 400 species, using the catalogue of plants as a way to process her loss, then her fear as her father maneuvers her into her own marriage. Deakin publishes her work under his name, though her knowledge of plants eventually brings about his downfall. In modern times, a U.S. Southerner attempts to recreate the catalogue as her fieldwork under her (male) academic advisor, tracking how climate change brings loss to the diversity of the plants at the Colosseum, as her advisor takes credit for her work and fails to help her launch her own independent research. VERDICT This subtle, intelligent work—arranged like a catalogue of plants, complete with sketches—explores how male power and threats like climate change take away agency from women. But it also looks at the small acts of resistance, pushing through like weeds in the cracks, that enable them to survive.—Jennie Mills
★ 2023-02-08
Two women are roiled by loss and desire.
Smith returns to Rome, the setting of her novel The Everlasting (2020), to render, in luminous prose, the lives of two unnamed women, a century apart, grieving, angry, and defiant. Each is engaged in botanical data collection: One, in 1854, assists British botanist Richard Deakin, who aims to record every species of plant growing in the Colosseum. Her father, outraged because she fell in love with a woman, indentured her to Deakin as punishment. In 2018, another woman combs the Colosseum: a graduate student from Mississippi working for a demeaning academic adviser, assigned to compare Deakin’s catalog with flora of the present day. Both women are haunted by loss: one, of her lover, who married; the other, of her mother, an amateur naturalist, who died when she was 15. Her mother taught her that plants “meant something. Not just in the doctrine-of-signatures way, or the yellow-rose-for-friendship way,” but in a deeply spiritual way. The only proof of beauty, her mother believed, “was a piece of living green pushing through a coffin of spring soil.” Smith makes deft use of Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, published in 1855, which combined meticulous botanical descriptions with information on each plant’s medicinal, culinary, and even literary significance. The women collectors are acutely sensitive to shape, texture, and odor and alert, as well, to plants’ cultural connotations and metaphorical richness: “Some plants, like lovers, are parasitical,” one collector reflects. “Naming carries bias, or bias worms its way to names.” The contemporary collector is enraged by the effects of climate change and rampant tourism on the ecology of the Colosseum. Both women rail against the arrogance and sexism that circumscribe their lives: “What does it take,” they ask, “to survive in this world, as a woman, as a weed?” The book is illustrated with delicate drawings by Schermer-Gramm.
A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.